|
Books by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
Trouble the Water
(1997) /
Black Southern Voices (1992) /
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008) /
The Katrina Papers
* * * *
*
Bio Sketch
Dr.
Jerry Ward is a distinguished professor of English and
African American World Studies at Dillard University, New
Orleans, LA. Ward spent 20 years as the Lawrence Durgin
Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College in Jackson. He is
recognized as one of the leading experts on Wright. His
credentials concerning Wright include, co-editor of the Richard
Wright Encyclopedia, to be published in 2006 by Greenwood
Press; founding member of the Richard Wright Circle, and his
recent portrayal of Richard Wright in the Mississippi Humanities
Council's Mississippi Chautauqua Writers series.
Dr. Jerry Ward contributed to the intellectual and cultural
climate in Jackson for many years.
Bio contd. * * * *
*
|
Love in a Foreign
House
By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
I
have wounded you.
The silence of your grief
Resonates between us
Loud as the screams
Of
a dead soldier
Dancing on phantom legs.
Life is tough; love, tougher
In
a foreign house
Pretending to be home.
25 May 2011 |
* * * *
*
* * * *
*
Making the Wright Connection
An Online Community for
the Study of Richard Wright
The Wright Connection is an online community of scholars and
teachers of the works of Richard Wright (1908-1960), the author
of such major works as
Uncle Tom's Children,
Native Son, and
Black Boy. The community grows out of a fifteen-month
program funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that
explored Richard Wright and his influence on the American idiom.
The program included a two-week summer institute held from July
11-24, 2010 at the University of Kansas, and subsequent virtual
seminars that used technology to foster collaboration among
participants.
The site serves as a
clearinghouse for all information about Richard Wright. We
welcome announcements of new books, articles, reviews, and
conferences, as well as discussions of new pedagogical
approaches to teaching Wright. We also serve as an archive of
past work on Wright, including the complete print run of the
Richard Wright Newsletter (1991-2006) and podcasts of
lectures by some of the world’s foremost scholars of Wright.
This site is administered
by the staff of the
Project on the History of Black Writing. If you are
interested in contributing materials to the site, you are asked
to contact us at
wrightconnection@ku.edu or at the following address: Project
on the History of Black Writing / Department of English / The
University of Kansas / 1445 Jayhawk Boulevard / Lawrence, KS
66045-7590
* * * *
*
New Orleans: A
Crossroad of Axes
By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Never shy about
proclaiming itself the birthplace of jazz or America’s
classical music, New Orleans does not talk about itself as a
point of origin for American literary traditions or
movements. The reason is not far to seek. What is original
in the literature of the Crescent City is French, West
African, Creole (Spanish and French), Bambara and Mande,
Cajun; it is rooted in Paris, Haiti, Martinique and St.
Domingue, Senegambia; its debt to London and the King James
Bible and the invention of American English is minimal. The
Louisiana Purchase was payment for property not for culture.
From 1804 to the present, the constipation of America’s
puritan ethos has been alien to the matrix of artisanship,
musical genius, performance, and wordsmithery of New
Orleans.
As
Marcus B. Christian
wrote in his famous poem “I Am New Orleans,”
culture is a blending and reinventing “Of Creoles,
Americans, Frenchmen, Spaniards,/ Jews/Africans, mix bloods,
Germans, Irishmen,/ and Indians” into “one common bond of
defense.” The city as “un entrepôt” defied the laws of
thermodynamics and achieved perpetual cultural motion at
very great cost, because it has never been free of racism,
colorism, discrimination, classism, economic oppression, and
sexism, the veneer of the carnivalesque notwithstanding.
New Orleans is New Orleans is New Orleans: an oscillating
metropolis of entreposage.
Tom Dent, a native son
of the city, put what is at issue clearly in “Report from
New Orleans,” the prose coda in Magnolia Street (1976), his
first collection of poems: “New Orleans is a weird town,
wavering in the breeze of history. An old place, one of the
few towns in this country where one can look at the layers
of two or three centuries in one glance. Then there is the
poised wrecking ball of ‘progress’.”
Perhaps the spirits
provoked by the winds and waters of the Storm (2005),
angered by the bloodless face of “progress now,” command us
to make a fresh inspection of cultural layers in this
laid-back and care-forgetting place. Perhaps the x,y, and z
coordinates of place demand a new articulation.
What have L’Album
Littéraire, Journal des Jeunes Gens, Amateurs
de la Littéraire (1843) and
Les Cenelles (1845), Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson’s
The Goodness of St. Rocque (1899) and Brenda Marie
Osbey’s Ceremony
for Minneconjoux (1983) to do with
Gumbo Ya-Ya (1945), the French Quarter-inspired
work of Sherwood Anderson, William Faulkner, and Tennessee
Williams, Bob Kaufman’s
The Ancient Rain; Poems 1956-1978, Tom Dent’s
classic play Ritual Murder, John Kennedy Toole’s
A Confederacy of Dunces (1987), or Kalamu ya
Salaam’s
What Is Life?: Reclaiming the Black Blues Self
(1994)? Does New Orleans ever take off the mask that grins
and hides to coax dollars from tourists long enough to
assess its own cultural wealth?
Truth be told, the
necessary answers will only surface through dedicated,
cross-generational conversations and even more dedicated
cross-class scholarship and public documentation among
citizens of New Orleans and the artists, performers,
writers, and musicians who devote their considerable
talents to preserving and recreating a unique, multi-faceted
culture in a city whose essence is not exactly American.
The answers may produce joy, anger, disbelief, or despair.
They are beyond prediction. What is most important is that
we collaborate in producing cultural knowledge that may be
critical and crucial for a future. For in the words of P. A.
Desdunes:
|
Nul n’estime le people ingrate qui dans l’oubli
Profond
laisse dormer ceux qui l’ont ennoble. |
The remembering, of
course, will be rendered in perfect New Orleans English.
* * * *
*
* * * *
*
|
Poem 67
By Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Dread ---- a season
for gluing codicils
on
certificates of birth,
for withdrawing deposits
from accounts of death.
All we need
when the dead awaken the dead
in
a dying planet ---
a fistful of absurdity.
27 July 2010 |
* * * *
*
Comments on James Baldwin’s The Cross of
Redemption
Guest Blogger Professor Jerry W.
Ward
Baldwin, James.
The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings. Ed.
Randall Kenan. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010
“Is A Raisin in the
Sun a Lemon in the Dark?” is one of the more revealing
essays in this collection. Disputing Nelson Algren’s
criticism of Hansberry’s play as a drama about real estate
and his valuation of Wright’s
Native Son, Baldwin contended “both Native Son
and
A Raisin in the Sun are flawed pieces of work,”
because he found “a profound connection between the two
works, and even certain rather obvious similarities.
Wright’s flaw is . . . involved with [an] attempt to
illuminate ruthlessly as unprecedented a creation as Bigger
by means of the stock characters of Jan, the murdered girl’s
lover, and Max, the white lawyer”(25). Bigger’s tortured
reality precludes belief in the two. Likewise, belief is
not warranted by Hansberry’s “juxtaposition of the
essentially stock . . . figure of the mother with the
intense (and unprecedented) figure of Walter Lee. Most
Americans do not know that he exists” (26).
Despite his awareness
in 1961 that drastic measures were needed to educate most
Americans about systemic racism, Baldwin yearned for
dramatic verisimilitude divorced from social data, for a
certain kind of art. One profits from reconsidering
Baldwin’s problematic judgment by way of reading Robin
Bernstein’s “Inventing a Fishbowl: White Supremacy and the
Critical Reception of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in
the Sun in Modern Drama (Spring 1999).
Baldwin’s venial flaw
was insufficient consideration of the agon of the particular
and the universal in American letters. His flaw leads to a
cardinal, contemporary question: should most Americans even
care that the characters Walter Lee Younger and Bigger
Thomas have become living human beings? An answer might
illuminate something.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.,
Professor of English at Dillard University, is the author
of The
Katrina Papers: A Journal of Trauma and Recovery (UNO
Press, 2008). A Richard Wright scholar, poet, literary
critic, Ward was born in Washington, DC but has spend most
of his adult life in Mississippi and Louisiana. He is
co-editor with Maryemma Graham of The
Cambridge History of African American Literature and
HBW Senior Board Member.
Source:
ProjectHBW
* * * *
*
Wright’s story “Down by the Riverside”
makes us aware that natural disaster and its subsequent traumas
do not necessarily lead to any transcending of racial
differentiation and skin privilege. As can be seen in the
way our mass media used various kinds of print and visual
narratives to report on New Orleans, a regressive process of
demonizing one portion of the city’s population and of erasing
the existence of other portions. The classic binary of black and
white was showcased with a vengeance. It is now very easy
to believe that no Latinas/Latinos, no Haitians, no Vietnamese,
no Japanese, no Chinese, no people of Asian descent
inhabited the city. They are a significant absence in the
ongoing discourse.
On Richard Wright and Our
Contemporary Situation
* * * * *
The Katrina Papers is not your
average memoir. It is a fusion of many kinds of
writing, including intellectual autobiography,
personal narrative, political/cultural analysis,
spiritual journal, literary history, and poetry.
Though it is the record of one man's experience of
Hurricane Katrina, it is a record that is fully a
part of his life and work as a scholar, political
activist, and professor.
The Katrina Papers
provides space not only for the traumatic events but
also for ruminations on authors such as Richard
Wright and theorists like Deleuze and Guattarri. The
result is a complex though thoroughly accessible
book. The struggle with form—the search for a
medium proper to the complex social, personal, and
political ramifications of an event unprecedented in
this scholar's life and in American social history—lies at the very heart of
The Katrina Papers. It
depicts an enigmatic and multi-stranded world view
which takes the local as its nexus for understanding
the global. It resists the temptation to simplify
or clarify when simplification and clarification are
not possible. Ward's narrative is, at times, very
direct, but he always refuses to simplify the
complex emotional and spiritual volatility of the
process and the historical moment that he is
witnessing. The end result is an honesty that is
both pedagogical and inspiring.—Hank Lazer
Dear Jerry,
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia (2008)
is a marvelous resource! It's not like any
encyclopedia I've seen before. Already, I have spent
hours reading through the various entries. So much is
there: people, themes, issues, events, bibliographies,
etc., related to Wright. Yours is a monumental
contribution! The more I read Wright (and about him),
the more I am amazed at the depth and breadth of his
work and its impact on the worlds of literature,
philosophy, politics, sociology, history, psychology,
etc. He was formidable!
Floyd W. Hayes
Dear
Jerry,
I received my copy of
The Katrina Papers
this past weekend. I had to order it directly from UNO
Press. This is a formidable volume! You write with such
eloquence, passion, insight, and power. As survivor and
raconteur of Katrina's devastation, you give the reader
your reflections on this event; you also provide us with
informed commentaries about a broad variety of other
issues that attract your attention and the people with
whom you interact. As a student of politics, I guess I
am just overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of your
critical observations. Reading this volume and
The Richard Wright Encyclopedia,
I can comprehend not only the centrality of Richard
Wright to your scholarly project, but I also can grasp
your own intellectual power a nd clear vision. For
example, your critique of Robert Lashley' rant about
Wright's LAWD TODAY is the model of the art of critique.
Marvelous!
Thanks for your generous comment on my paper on
Robeson and Wright. I continue to read both of your
books. As always,
Floyd W. Hayes
* *
* * *
Rudy, Jerry's
Katrina Papers, which I started
reading last night, is, indeed, extraordinary. It's
not a new genre, however; it's really set in the
frame of a journal—not
the 19th-century kind like that of Ida B. Wells and
of so many other, primarily women writers of that
period—but
more like the "new diary," described by
Tristine Rainer as a "journal for self guidance
and expanded creativity." In many ways it's similar
to
Frida Kahlo's journal or notebook—in
her case, designed for creative self-expression
through the incorporation of sketches, notes, and
symbols (primarily visual images); in his case
designed for intellectual reflection through the
incorporation of verbal images and symbols.
In many ways,
his journal and the "new diary" finds its postmodern
manifestation in the blog, particularly one like
Ethelbert's. The journal/new diary/blog is an
extremely flexible genre that permits the inclusion
of various other forms: poetry, Q & As, course
syllabi, dialogs, prose pieces, doodlings, sketches,
dramatic scenes, etc. I was particularly fascinated
with Jerry's piece about his body, suggesting as it
does, separation and disconnection from the "life of
the mind" that he lives. Jerry is an intellectual
par excellence with little indication in the
Papers
of his physical/pleasurable self. Maybe he'll
expand later in the book on his trips to casinos and
enjoyment of Jack Daniels. But, then, the book is
not a reflection on joy, but, as you say, of power
and clarity in the midst of disaster and depression.
Most people would have disintegrated under such
trauma. More about this later as I get my thoughts
together. Miriam
* *
* * *
Treme: Beyond Bourbon Street (HBO)
* *
* * *
* * * *
* Douglas Redd
Cultural Summit—Dillard University,
Prelude, March 14, 2009—After August 29,
2005, the demographics of New Orleans shifted
dramatically. The shift, to overstate the case,
changed everything: how we shop and how we cook; how
we talk to one another; how we use celebrations as
signs of hope and as mechanisms of denial and how we
deal with or pretend we do not have to deal with
racism, political corruption, and crime; how we
educate and miseducate young people as we watch them
walk down the road to death. We do, however,
continue to invent bullshit excuses for our
shortcomings (lack of enforceable norms) and to
perpetuate the myth of THE BLACK COMMUNITY as if
time has not moved since 1968. There are African
American communities in New Orleans, some of them
very ancient and some, quite new. No such animal
named THE BLACK COMMUNITY any longer exists.—
Jerry W. Ward, Jr.,
Professor of English. Dillard University, author of
The Katrina Papers: A Journal of
Trauma and Recovery
Source:
Summit Comments 2009.htm /
Summit Summary 2009
* * * *
* In the
Summer of ‘82
In the summer of '82, I
heard perplexing things. One scholar proclaimed that if God had
never spoken directly to a Black woman or man, his behavior was
racist. Where, asked the scholar, was proof in fact or
fiction. Moreover, the Black theologian refused to deal with
Black atheism.
Another brother wondered if the historical Jesus had learned his
religion from Coptic Christians. What was Christ doing in
Ethiopia during the Hidden Years, given that Ethiopia was the
playground for the Greek gods? Why has a story which centered
on a Jew with hair like lamb's wool (I suspect said genuine
Hebrew would have fought with the PLO) . . . why had this story
sent African Americans into the recesses of beyond-salvation?
Even sisters dressed to the nines with five inch high heels or
three inch long roaches exploring my laundry bag proved to be
insufficient distraction.
God was popping up all over. Especially in fiction. Alice
Walker let the spirits speak in The Color Purple, thereby
preserving her soul from eternal damnation. Alice as instrument
of spirit said: God is neither HE nor SHE but IT. And likewise
the Greeks found books in the Library at Alexandria that were
Greek to them. They invented philosophers to carry the weight.
Knowledge in books is often heavy. Among other amazing facts I
discovered that the State of Georgia suffered Washington's
revenge in 1915. As soon as Booker T. Washington died, the boll
weevil invaded.
Brother Hakim worries about the class conflict in Nigeria.
Neither in Lagos nor in Atlanta can people venture outside after
9:00 p.m. Squirrels began to fold their arms and die for no
reason on the Spelman campus. Even for the celebration of such
revenge, God was present. Horror, I am convinced, is
conversion. Jerry Ward
* * * *
*
* * * *
*
David Walker knew very well
in 1829 that consciousness
and action are crucial if an
oppressed population is ever
to free itself from
wretchedness. We can not
depend on the American
criminal justice system for
remedies, because the recent
antics of the neo-con
Supreme Court sanction
anything and everything
behind the twin disguises of
judicial process and
national security. Like
Walker, we must present the
case of our plight in the
courts of world, simply as a
matter of record. Such a
move would create a global
environment for discussion,
but the more meaningful work
has to be done on site in
Jena, LA and everywhere else
by grassroots leaders and
community people who are
directly affected by police
attacks.
Security Guards Beat School Teen
* * * *
* I do worry that the very people who
contributed to the flavor and culture of New Orleans will truly
be too poor to afford housing in the NEW New Orleans. As
one of my friends put it, "Katrina passed judgment on
America and the country has been found wanting." Thanks, Rudy, for promoting open dialogue
about life and death issues. We can prevent rumor as
easily as we can prevent terrorism. We can succeed, however, in asking questions
about why we can not spend as much money to restore homes as we
have spent to destroy Iraq. And those questions do need to
appear in global cyberspace.
Jerry
Ward Reports on Dillard
* * * *
*
There is rancid irony in my giving loving attention to
Richard Wright’s violence-drenched work as we approach
his centennial. Men and women of all colors only
half-listened to Wright and other writers who focused on
peoplekind’s destructive potential, preferring to dance
in the twilight zone of arts, self-congratulation
regarding the achievements of technology and
science, entertainments, romantic illusions. We have
not changed much. We are still dancing in 2007. The
irony consists of my not feeling exceptionally good
about playing the role of a reverse John the
Baptist. As Wright remarked in 1944 about the
genesis of Black Boy, “to tell the truth is
the hardest thing on earth, harder than fighting in
a war, harder than taking part in a revolution.
Indeed I discovered that writing like that is a kind
of war and revolution.”
KATRINA REPORT New Orleans 2007 * * * *
*
All I can say about this piece [What's
So New About Obama?] is that Martin Luther
King, Jr. and Malcolm X were probably the last
leaders to whom large numbers of black Americans
were willing to accord genuine respect. Neither was
a politician. Now we have politicians who seem to
believe class is far more important than race. Their
minds are visually and visionally challenged. Obama
and other figures mentioned in Zafran's article
belong to a new breed of elected officials who may
indeed lead white Americans and their black friends into
or out of hell. Insofar as most
black Americans exist willingly or unwillingly
within the American body politic, they will be in
various coaches on the train.
I judge these people [ so-called black leaders] to
be persons with slight historical consciousness whom
I have not elected or selected to lead me anywhere.
They are interested in power (a vague concept),
money, and idealistic hot air. Each of us must make
an individual decision about who will indeed lead us
daily. Those who lead me are all dead ---my known
ancestors, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W. E.
B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells, Margaret Walker, and
Richard Wright; they lead me to use my talents for
the benefit of my people, people who try desperately
to be good citizens of the world. Zafran's article
is laughable because it is naive.
Jerry Ward
* * * *
*
[Tom] Dent did not aim his parting shots at the philosophical
traditions which defined the role of his alma mater in
the history of African American culture. His target was the kind
of pedagogy which served to miseducate and underprepare Negro
students. Having been trained to think critically at Morehouse
by the brilliant political scientist Robert Brisbane, Dent could
discriminate nicely between the value of honoring tradition and
the negation that resulted from blind “worship” of
traditions. The work Dent would produce during the next four
decades is marked by his penchant for reason, for surgical
analysis of affairs, for being informed about the cutting edge
of history’s progress.
The Art of Tom Dent
* * * *
*
* * * *
*
Institutional racism is the very backbone of
the industry that champions and valorizes thug culture. That
some presumably intelligent African Americans should be gears in
the machinery of institutional racism is not astonishing. They
have embraced the current version of the American Dream. After
all, they have no obligations under the laws of brute economy to
be more noble than Africans who sold other Africans to
Europeans.
If Reginald Hudlin and Tracey Edmonds and the
non-black black-oriented BET celebrate Kimberly Jones (aka Lil’
Kim) for her crimes, they are acting in ways that historical
narratives allow us to predict. Although King did not include
either thug culture or racial treason or sinister
commodification in his dream-script, these things are undeniable
components of our post-1968 America.
Ms. Tucker’s juxtaposing the memory of
King’s death with the success of trafficking in lawlessness is
sobering. It is regrettable that, on the other hand, she failed
to place the abuse of King’s sacrifice in the context of the
pervasive lawlessness that is honored at the highest level of
American government and business.
Messages on MLK
Day
* * * *
*
Yesterday, I regretted discarding
five boxes of LPs. These were choice albums I spent more
than forty years collecting. With dry eyes and a wet
heart, I consign my music to the curbside. My music is
trash. LPs, cassettes, and many CDs have become trash.
Emptiness pains like a fishbone caught in the throat.
You can have more CDs, but you are not fond of CDs.
Aretha Franklin does not sound right on a CD. She sounds
corrected. So too do Stevie Wonder, Duke Ellington,
Louis Armstrong, and Stevie Ray Vaughn. "Cold Shot."
Perhaps classical music sounds very good on a CD.
Classical music is, after all, hypercorrect.
But Clifford Brown, Buddy Guy, Esther
Phillips, Lynn Gold, Cassandra Wilson, Jerry Butler, the
soundtracks of The Color Purple and For
Colored Girls . . . and Shaft, and Tommy
James and the Shantells are not hypercorrect. They, the
recorded traces of their creation, are human in the
grooves. When you want to hear Roland Kirk's Oleo,
you must hear the grooves and scratches. It took you
twenty years to begin to understand the musical
structures of Oleo, and you do not want to have
that pain and pleasure cheapened by a CD.
Making Peace
with the Loss of Things
* * *
* *
Not Gone
With the Wind Voices of Slavery—Henry Louis
Gates, Jr.—9 February 2003—Unchained Memories,
an HBO documentary that makes its debut tomorrow
night, provides a powerful answer to that question.
It gives us, through the faces and voices of
African-American actors, an introduction to a vast
undertaking that took place in the 1930's: the
collection and preservation of the testimonies of
thousands of aged former slaves in an archive known
as the Slave Narrative Collection of the Federal
Writers' Project. This archive unlocked the brutal
secrets of slavery by using the voices of average
slaves as the key, exposing the everyday life of the
slave community. Rosa Starke, a slave from South
Carolina, for example, told of how class divisions
among the slaves were quite pronounced:
''Dere was just
two classes to de white folks, buckra slave owners
and poor white folks dat didn't own no slaves. Dere
was more classes 'mongst de slaves. De fust class
was de house servants. Dese was de butler, de maids,
de nurses, chambermaids, and de cooks. De nex' class
was de carriage drivers and de gardeners, de
carpenters, de barber and de stable men. Then come
de nex' class, de wheelwright, wagoners, blacksmiths
and slave foremen. De nex' class I members was de
cow men and de niggers dat have care of de dogs. All
dese have good houses and never have to work hard or
git a beatin'. Then come de cradlers of de wheat, de
threshers and de millers of de corn and de wheat,
and de feeders of de cotton gin. De lowest class was
de common field niggers.''—NYTimes
* * *
* *
* *
* * *
 |
1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus
Created
By Charles C. Mann
I’m
a big fan of Charles Mann’s previous
book
1491:
New Revelations of the Americas Before
Columbus, in which he
provides a sweeping and provocative
examination of North and South America
prior to the arrival of Christopher
Columbus. It’s exhaustively researched
but so wonderfully written that it’s
anything but exhausting to read. With
his follow-up,
1493, Mann has taken it to a
new, truly global level. Building on the
groundbreaking work of Alfred Crosby
(author of
The Columbian Exchange and, I’m
proud to say, a fellow Nantucketer),
Mann has written nothing less than the
story of our world: how a planet of what
were once several autonomous continents
is quickly becoming a single,
“globalized” entity.
Mann not only talked to countless
scientists and researchers; he visited
the places he writes about, and as a
consequence, the book has a marvelously
wide-ranging yet personal feel as we
follow Mann from one far-flung corner of
the world to the next. And always, the
prose is masterful. In telling the
improbable story of how Spanish and
Chinese cultures collided in the
Philippines in the sixteenth century, he
takes us to the island of Mindoro whose
“southern coast consists of a number of
small bays, one next to another like
tooth marks in an apple.” We learn how
the spread of malaria, the potato,
tobacco, guano, rubber plants, and sugar
cane have disrupted and convulsed the
planet and will continue to do so until
we are finally living on one integrated
or at least close-to-integrated Earth.
Whether or not the human instigators of
all this remarkable change will survive
the process they helped to initiate more
than five hundred years ago remains,
Mann suggests in this monumental and
revelatory book, an open question. |
* *
* * *
|
Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
|
 |
posted 4 April 2006
/ updated 19 July 2011
|
